The Federal Government has quietly been warning operators of electrical grids, transportation hubs, and other key infrastructure about the threat of cyber attacks, which could shut them down and cause chaos.

However Vulcan area cyber security expert, David Swan, who's a former Naval and Military Intelligence Officer and is currently The Executive Vice President, Defence Intelligence Group, with the Center for Strategic Cyberspace & Security Science, says it's not foreign powers that will bring this vital infrastructure down, but disgruntled employees.

"Disgruntled employees? You betcha! And if you're treating your employees less than well. For example, typically Network Administrators are not well paid, overworked and under-appreciated. That's not a smart thing to do."

He points to the recent case of an Employee with the City of San Francisco, who after being fired from his job changed the password to the City's computer system, effectively shutting everyone out of it for short time.

Swan says threats aren't just on your laptop or desktop anymore, but are into anything connected to the Internet like new "smart appliances."

He says hackers are getting into in places most of us wouldn't think of.

In the last few days, there were two families in Texas who discovered their baby monitors had been hacked and there were people viewing their children in their cribs. There's the hack on cars that have captured a lot of imagination because of their ability to put cars in the ditch."

Swan says Russian groups take the bulk of the blame for most cyber attacks these days, and he says while that's true some of the time, he says you can't discount the Chinese, or India and Vietnam, which are quickly working their way up the list of countries who are the biggest risk to cyber security.